Camp Samoset II for Boys: Summer of ‘72

Once you get old enough, you realize that there are moments that are so singular, so inconsistent with how you’ve lived your life, that you’re amazed that they happened to you at all. Jerry Seinfeld joked something to the effect that people say that life is too short, but he thinks it’s too long. I agree, in that only in an extremely long life could this have happened to me.

After my freshman year in college, I was hired to coach baseball at a boys’ camp in Casco, Maine, alongside Lake Pleasant, 35 miles northwest of Portland. My sister’s husband was getting his doctorate at Boston University, and one of the readers on his dissertation was a fellow called Steve Shatkin, who was part owner of the camp. That connection doesn’t really explain how I got the job. Nothing does.

In any event, I arrived at the camp in the first week in June. The weather was miserable, cold and rainy, and the weedy, rocky baseball field was under an inch of water. There was another, senior baseball coach named Richie; for some reason, we were never on the baseball field together. Whether this was a matter of scheduling or Richie’s negligence I have no memory. At some point early in the summer, the owners praised “the work that is happening on the basketball court and the baseball field.” That would have included me, then. One night, as I walked from my cabin to the lake, I glanced in the owners’ well-lit house and Richie was playing bridge with them.

I soon learned that I had really stepped in it. There were never any newcomers at this camp except for the little boys whose first year it was. Everyone came back, year after year, until they aged into becoming a counselor-in-training and then finally a counselor. I was a complete outsider and felt it keenly.

The owner and his brother, who hung around a lot, were known as Foon and Fenton. Someone said that Fenton, the non-owner, acted like he owned the place anyway. Fenton was kind of a hoot; he admitted to being a real preppy, had the khakis, Izod shirts, and comb-over to prove it, and expected to be named Secretary of Youth in Ted Kennedy’s administration.

The kids were all from White Plains, Newton, or Miami, and everyone was wealthy. Our first night there, at dinner for the counselors who were putting the camp into shape, we were served meatloaf which I found tasty. At an all-hands meeting the next day, everyone was outraged that the meat was too fatty. Steve Shatkin was in charge of procuring the meat and agreed that we’d find a new vendor.

I was the only gentile in camp, save, weirdly enough, for the adult head of counselors, a high school P.E. teacher named Gordie. Every year, he would tell a group of boys of some certain age a story about a football player at Columbia who had a blind father. One year, the father died, and the football player said, “Finally, this is the first year my father will get to see me play.” Gordie invariably cried at the end.

Everything else is a bit of a blur.

We went to bars; you could drink at 18 then. There was a girls’ camp across the lake, called something like Camp Rapatack, which sounds a little like sex on a rickety camp bed, and we met girls there. The other counselor in my bunk, Dan Norton from Westport, CT, was in love with a girl named Melissa.

The fad at camps that summer was to hire a kid from England to come teach soccer, which in those days may as well have been something the aliens brought and then only to the northeast. No one in my south Florida county played soccer. The English boy’s name was Gordon Bailey, and he would sit in that bar with his blue eyes and wavy blond hair looking sincere like an RAF fighter pilot and the girls all swarmed around. Once, Gordon kicked a soccer ball at me, just a flick of his ankle, and it nearly broke my wrists.

One night, as I lay out on the baseball field (where Dan claimed he eventually wooed Melissa’s shorts off), I saw for the first and only time in my life the Northern Lights. I staggered back down to the camp and encountered a bearded fellow whose job was to put together the yearbook. He smiled knowingly when I gushed about them, and kindly said, “They’re really something, aren’t they?” I remember his kindness because I encountered some very rare and casual casual discrimination. One guy called me “Schmeke Jarecke”.

On our off nights—we were given a couple of 36 hour weekends—we drove to Portland to a Chinese restaurant, or up to Poland Springs, and there were “midnight hoops”. Some of the counselors were extremely good athletes; Andy, the basketball coach, had played in the Maccabiah Games. I had not yet been schooled by North Carolina fellows in pickup basketball, but these guys did allow that I had a quick jump shot—just nothing else. Late at night, we’d go for “a quick quack around the lake”: a drive to smoke the thin-smelling ineffective marijuana we could procure. The name derived from some fellow saying, “I know you’re talking, but I can only hear quacking.”

I nearly killed a sheep. The owners had tied one up in deep centerfield; I think the camp purported to teach something about science, and, well, sheep = science. I was hitting fly balls to the boys and accidentally caught hold of one. It soared high and far over the center fielder’s head, hung up, then dropped about ten feet from the sheep. Standing at the point of contact, as it were, I could tell that it would miss the sheep by a comfortable margin, but that didn’t stop the sheep from bleating and fleeing the moment the ball hit. I’ve never before or since threatened a sheep.

As if this whole summer weren’t strange enough, I ran into two people I knew from high school. Andy Caster, a year younger, handsome with blue eyes and blond hair, was actually a counselor, but he broke his leg right away and spent the summer under a tree reading, and the yearbook reported him being voted the most worthless person in camp. No such vote was ever taken. These guys were not short on sense of humor.

And then one day we drove across Maine and New Hampshire to Camp Winaukee, on Lake

Winnipesaukee, to play baseball against the boys there. Their counselors were all clean-cut southern boys, the management’s choice, we were told, and they beat the tar out of us. Afterward, we used their pool, and I saw Gail Westenhiser, a year older than I. We had a nice chat though I obtained a very strange rash on my arm that promptly went away. I’ve never had it again, another first and last.

At the end of the summer, the camp was divided into two groups for color war, grey and red. Some of the counselors, like Dan, were “judges”—referees, umpires, etc. I had hoped to be one, but I was on one team or another. One day, my team of 11 year olds crushed the other side, and one of the other counselors on my team said, “I’m sure glad we didn’t have to play you today.” I was taken aback; no one had ever praised me like that before.

Soon enough, the week of color war was over. The final act of the summer, in the first week of August, was a raft floating over the waterfront, with the date “1972” in some sort of flammable material that suddenly caught flame and burned. It was quite moving, actually, a very tangible sign that the summer was over.

The story can’t end there, of course. In August of 1984, Nancy and I married. Unlike everyone else living south of the Mason Dixon line, we didn’t go to the Caribbean for our honeymoon but to New England. We spent a few days in Boston, then Vermont, New Hampshire, and then Maine. We drove to Camp Samoset II for boys, and Steve Shatkin was there. He didn’t recognize me at first, but once I identified myself as John Elegant’s brother-in-law, he laughed and said, “Do they still have all those pets?”

Steve and I umpired together. He had been an umpire in semi-pro ball and really knew his stuff. He taught me a lot about umpiring, such as communicating on certain situations and teamwork: a hand across his chest reminded each of us that the infield fly rule was in effect.

He posed a baseball question for me involving numerous rules that I got right for the wrong reason. Years later, Nancy and I decided to write a book on baseball and its similarity to American law, and I made that problem the introduction to the book. I tracked Steve down, retired by then, and he was gracious and helpful, correcting me, as always, when I was about to mess something up.

When I decided to write this blog post, I thought I’d see if Steve was still around. He isn’t, and coincidentally he died on February 8 of this year at 82. I wonder if he was waiting for me to plan this post. By the way, Camp Samoset II for Boys is no more either. The site appears to be occupied by something called Hoop Basketball Camp. I contacted the coach, and she said that no, the basketball camp occupied adjoining ground. The old camp had been torn down and the land is owned by an individual.

One last educational moment: A 14 year old named Tracy attended camp. One afternoon, I taught him a really good curveball--sharp break, long curve. I was quite pleased, thinking myself quite the baseball coach. Later, one of the other counselors, told me quietly, "You realize that Tracy is one of the best athletes ever to come through here, right?"

Oh. Of course he was. i was quite rightfully brought back down to earth. It was an educational summer, and nothing in my life has quite been like it, before or since.

Camp Samoset, in one of its last years.